Steam’s monthly top-seller list is automated now, and goes all the way back to 2004 when it’s just Half-Life 2

Every month Steam publishes a list of its top releases by revenue, which often includes some surprises. This month Oblivion Remastered, The Last of Us 2, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and Blue Prince are selling real well, though Steam’s gold-tier top 12 also includes The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, a game so ambitious it pushed its creators to the brink of bankruptcy.

Steam’s been doing these charts since 2019, though until now they were assembled by hand, which Steam’s latest news blog says has been “leading to a less-than-consistent publishing cadence as we waited to complete all of the necessary work each time.”

From now on the charts will be automated and published on the 15th of each month, with calculations based on “the first two weeks of revenue for each of the games released during the month.” Since being “released” on Steam can mean either entering early access or leaving it to hit 1.0, early access games will be considered for the list twice. Each list will contain 50 entries, including DLC if it sells well enough.

These newly automated lists can also be browsed backward, meaning you can jump all the way back to November of 2004, when the top release on Steam was Half-Life 2 because it was the only release on Steam. The list then stays blank until October, 2005, when Rag Doll Kung Fu arrives (though Darwinia, which was famously the other early non-Valve game released on Steam, doesn’t show up for some reason).

Jumping forward to August of 2010, when I downloaded Steam at the insistence of my physical copy of Mafia 2, there are still only enough games being released for a top 10. At the top of the list is Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days. I can feel myself tumbling into a memory hole, and I might be gone for some time.